Mary Bottari's blog

When the Senate bank reform legislation passed in May, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it sent the message to Wall Street "no longer can you recklessly gamble away other people's money." The bill told Main Street "you no longer have to fear that your savings, your retirement or your home are at the mercy of greedy gamblers in big banks. And it says to them: never again will you be asked to bail out those big banks when they lose their risky bets," according to Reid.

Even though the bank reform bill working its way through Congress is far from perfect, there are some strong provisions well worth fighting for as the bill moves to a House-Senate conference committee.

This week, the U.S. Senate passed a financial reform bill that was far stronger than what had been proposed by the Obama administration and passed by the House. Now it’s time to hold President Obama’s feet to the fire to ensure the strongest possible bill.

Guest Blog by Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of "A New Way Forward"

If you're sick of lobbyists and their bought off legislators, come to the next showdown in Washington DC. Next Monday (May17th) at 11:45 AM, it's time we go right after some of the most powerful people in the world -- the bank lobbyists who work on K Street. The campaign for fixing Wall Street has grown tremendously in the past year. It's now or never to show that we, the public, want our big banking problems fixed, not dodged. Meet at 15th and K Street.

The good news on the Senate financial reform bill these days is that we have a few provisions worth fighting for. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) has introduced one of the most important - a bold section in the Dodd bank reform bill (Section 716, colloquially known as 106) that will force the biggest banks to spin off their swaps (or derivatives) desks into a separate entity.

Today a right-left coalition scored a victory for the American people when Senators voted 96-0 to audit the Federal Reserve.

The Center for Media and Democracy’s Wall Street Bailout Tally shows that since 2008, the U.S. government has flooded Wall Street banks and financial institutions with $4.7 trillion dollars in taxpayer money, mostly in the form of loans from the Fed reserve. The Fed has never told us which firms got these loans and what type of collateral American taxpayers got in return. This will now be revealed. We will also get an accounting of the Fed’s “stealth” bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

Last week’s “flash crash,” which sent stocks plummeting 1,000 points in an afternoon, was just the latest indicator that the U.S. financial system is still spinning out of control and desperately in need of new rules.

Dylan Ratigan (MSNBC) is the host of the only honest business show on cable. He doesn't spend his day only talking about the ups and the downs of the stock market and encouraging people to "buy, buy, buy!" Ratigan covers real issues, like how the financial crisis is affecting average Americans and what the chances are for real reform in Congress.

Statement from Mary Bottari, Director of the Real Economy Project for the Center for Media and Democracy:

“Today Wall Street won and the American people lost. Jamie Dimon is popping the champaigne corks. He met with the White House on Monday night and his team has been lobbying the Senate hard, arguing that any size cap on behemoth banks would make him uncompetitive. But a size cap is the single best way to prevent the growth of ‘too big to fail’ firms that threaten to collapse the global economy. And it is the single best way to protect taxpayers from future bailouts,” said Bottari. JP Morgan Chase spent $6,170,000 lobbying against financial reform in 2009 according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Investment banker Sam Zamarripa, spokesman for the financial industry's front group "Stop Too Big To Fail" (STBTF) announced that his group is funding a third series of television ads set to air in the Washington, D.C. cable media market. The ads try to trick people into opposing the financial reforms currently being considered by the Senate by misleadingly claiming the current legislation provides for "unlimited executive bailout authority." The current legislation would not ensure "unlimited bailouts," but rather does the opposite; it puts an end to taxpayer-funded bailouts.